Hospitals battle to meet waiting times target

HOSPITALS are facing an increasing struggle to meet a key waiting time target, a report claims today.

The study by the National Audit Office (NAO) also warns discrepancies in how waiting figures are recorded means they need to be treated “with a degree of caution”.

It found some hospitals are failing to accurately monitor how long thousands of their patients are waiting for treatment, with some saying patients waited less time than they did for treatment, or longer.

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NHS targets say 90 per cent of admitted hospital patients should start their treatment within 18 weeks.

Today’s report said spot checks of 650 orthopaedic cases at seven trusts including Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust found a significant number of errors.

In one in six cases, there was no evidence of the date the patient was referred. Only two in five cases were fully documented, with officials in Leeds performing worst, correctly recording only 12 out of 95 cases.

Out of 167 cases with errors, three in four led to the waiting time being under-recorded.

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“There was an overall under-
recording of three weeks (mean) per patient,” it concluded.

Today’s report said the typical waiting time for patients who had received treatment was “steadily increasing”.

It added: “Nationally, the figures for individual trusts show that some do breach the standard. In 2012-13, for example, 58 trusts breached the standard, overall, in at least one month for patients admitted to hospital.”

The “challenge” of meeting the 18-week target is also rising due to issues such as financial pressures although overall figures show it is being met.

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Without independent validation of trust data, the system currently used by NHS England would “not detect errors or misreporting of the type identified in this report”, it stated. And it said local variations in how the waiting time rules were applied – with some of this variation sanctioned by NHS England – meant the performance of individual trusts was not directly comparable.

The report concluded: “Value for money is being undermined by the problems with the completeness, consistency and accuracy of patient waiting time data; and by differences in the way that patient referrals to hospitals are managed.”

The study found that the recent strengthening of the 18-week target to focus on patients who had experienced very long waits “appears to have had a rapid and significant effect on reducing the numbers of people waiting a long time for treatment”.

Amyas Morse, head of the NAO, said: “The challenge of sustaining the 18-week waiting standards is increasing, against a background of an increasing number of patients being referred to trusts, the financial pressure on the NHS and the need to make efficiency savings.

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“If this challenge is to be met, then performance information should be reliable. However, we have found significant errors and inconsistencies in how trusts record waiting time, masking a good deal of variation between trusts in actual waiting times.”

Bill McCarthy, NHS England’s director of policy and strategy, said: “More than a million patients are treated by the NHS each month with over 91 per cent of them starting their treatment within the 18-week target and around half of these patients only wait nine weeks or less.

“NHS England firmly believes 
it is essential to have accurate information provided in a timely way to ensure better care for patients. The NAO rightly points out where there are problems with data and these must be addressed.”